Compare And Contrast By Elizabeth Bradstreet

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struggled “with the nature of authority more personally and internally than did most of their male peers.” William Scheick adds that “Biblically, theologically, ecclesiastically, socially, and family, women were second and the weaker sex. To be second, it hardly needs to be observed, was to be less empowered in relation to the theocratic authority that had defined one as secondary” (167). In order to build a family, Bradstreet needed to have a good relationship with her husband based on love, respect and obedience. For that, Bradstreet wrote a poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband”2. The poem reveals the speaker’s obedience and humiliation in her duty as a wife. She says: “If ever two were one, then surely we. / If ever man were loved by wife, …show more content…

Four of her grand children died (Elizabeth, Anne, Simon). Furthermore, her house burned down with all her precious properties. By becoming melancholic after several losses of her family members, she wrote several elegies lamenting their deaths. She almost described all the events by prose and poem. In each poem, there is inner conflict between her worldly materialism and solace of spirituality. Bradstreet wrote “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet for her dear grandchildren Elizabeth, who died in 1665 at the age of year and half. Bradstreet was a devout Puritan who believed in God 's grace and His will, but she was also deeply attached to her family. The poem reveals Bradstreet struggling to accept God’s will while mourning on the death of her grandchildren, Elizabeth. In the poem, the speaker expresses her profound feelings of love and grief for her deceased grandchild. The poem starts …show more content…

She began to overcome her dissatisfaction with what God ordained. In the poem “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet,” the speaker declares: “Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate, / or sight thy days so soon were terminate,/ Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state” (5-7). She knows that it is against her faith to reject fate. Therefore, she detaches herself from her strong affection for “Elizabeth,” and accepts the reality that God has taken her to “everlasting state.” The speaker compares the death of the child to nature: “corn and grass are in their season mown” (10) to reveal her sadness that her child does not live long as it is common in the natural order. But the speaker concludes with comfort in her faith that it is in “His [God’s] hand alone that Guides nature and fate”

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